This exhibit celebrates the intellectual contributions, as well as the global impact and legacy, of UC Berkeley's unique program in Buddhist studies. It features publications of alumni and faculty, as well as Berkeley's manuscript collections that made this research possible. While the scholarship presented here reflects the broad interdisciplinary orientation of the Berkeley program, it is grounded in the philological expertise — the ability to work with often arcane Buddhist canonical materials that survive in languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese — that is the hallmark of the Berkeley program.

This exhibit recognizes the scholars who founded the Group in Buddhist Studies, their precursors, and those who continue to lead the program today. It features samples of East Asian Buddhist canons, Mongolian and Tibetan texts, Dunhuang manuscript canons, sacred texts of Nepalese Buddhism, Southeast Asian palm-leaf manuscripts, The Tipiṭaka, an edition of the Pali given by King Chulalongkorn of Siam, as well as European publications of Buddhist studies. The exhibit highlights the evolution, breadth, and remarkable success of Buddhist studies scholarship at Berkeley through materials housed at The Bancroft Library, C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Doe Library, South/Southeast Asia Library, and Northern Regional Library Facility.

Dai Jin: Summer Trees Casting Shade,
15th century; ink and colors on silk;
78 x 42 1/8 in.; purchase made possible
through gifts from an anonymous donor,
Robert Bloch, the Warren King Family,
Jane Lurie, Kirsten and Terry Michelsen,
and other Friends of the Asian Gallery.

The late James Cahill, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley, was known as a brilliant scholar, exceptional teacher and writer, and extraordinary connoisseur and collector of Chinese and Japanese paintings. He began collecting in the mid–1950s as a Fulbright Scholar in Japan, where he encountered significantly undervalued Chinese paintings of the Ming and Qing periods. At the time few collectors were interested in these later paintings and fewer still understood their inherent value. But Cahill recognized their importance and so began a lifelong pursuit of fine paintings. His collection became known by his studio name, Ching Yuan Chai, given to him by his own teacher, Shimada Shujiro. As Cahill wrote, "It could be either Studio of Someone Looking into the Yuan (as I was for my dissertation) or, more prestigiously, Someone Gazing into the Abstruse." Today paintings associated with that studio name are among the treasures that make up the core of the BAM/PFA Chinese painting collection. In fond memory of James Cahill (1926–2014), we present this selection from the collection in tribute to his tremendous generosity and commitment to Berkeley and to BAM/PFA.

Cahill, unlike some of his contemporaries as well as historic Chinese collectors, did not mark with a seal or inscription the paintings in his collection. Rather, he made his mark by donating — and encouraging others to donate — exceptionally fine paintings to BAM/PFA. This small exhibition presents just a handful of works, but they demonstrate the unparalleled range of Cahill’s collecting interests, from Summer Trees Casting Shade, a large decorative painting by Dai Jin (1388–1462), to the quietly cerebral The Zhiping Temple by Wen Zhengming (1470–1559).

Cahill frequently used the collection for teaching, engaging students in dialogue about brushwork, connoisseurship, authenticity, and condition, and looking intently at real works of art, a tradition that continues today.

Multiple encounters puts the video work of Yang Fudong in direct dialogue with historical Chinese paintings, a juxtaposition that raises questions about how we view both Yang's work and classical art. Connecting the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, this exhibition suggests that some of the magical qualities of Yang's work may be inherited from the Chinese classical tradition.

Ten classical paintings, in traditional formats, are displayed together with Yang's seven-minute single-channel video The Half Hitching Post (2005). The video tells the story of two young men moving to an isolated village at the same time a young couple struggles to escape it. The journey takes place on the Loess Plateau in northern China, where the grandeur and timelessness of the landscape recall images from classical paintings. (Yang first studied painting at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou before switching to photography and film.)

Yang's cinematic aesthetics, presenting a multiplicity of views by constructing numerous narratives, intriguingly echo the multipoint perspectives of classical painting. For example, Wen Zhengming's sixteeth-century Landscape with Figures depicts mountains with several paths that provide ways for the figures in the painting to meet at some future point.

This fresh encounter between antique works and contemporary moving images challenges us to consider how artists today are influenced by the past.

Eugene Wang, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University, looks at Yang Fudong's films in the context of the large shifts in Chinese art over the past twenty years, especially the rise of the new medium of yingxiang, or projected images. Followed by a conversation with exhibition curator Philippe Pirotte.

Wang, noted for his scholarship in both historical and contemporary Chinese art and cinema, brings special insight to Yang's work and influences. A Guggenheim Fellow, Wang is the author of Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China and the art history editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism. His current projects include a book on "automated visuality" in early and medieval Chinese art.

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting investigates a relatively unexamined area of Chinese art history: meiren (beautiful women) paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This exhibition is the first to bring together a broad selection of paintings in this genre, and includes work from public and private collections in the United States and Europe, as well as from the BAM/PFA collection. Organized by Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White in collaboration with UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus James Cahill, one of the world's leading scholars of Chinese painting, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with essays by Cahill, White, Sarah Handler, and Chen Fongfong with a contribution by Nancy Berliner.

Join Sarah Handler, an authority on Chinese furniture and architecture in relation to the other arts, for an exploration of the elegant interiors and furnishings represented in meiren paintings. Among other topics, she discusses the bizarrely shaped gnarled-wood seats, tables, and other furnishings that express aspects of the Chinese aesthetic imagination that have persisted for more than two thousand years. Handler's publications include Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture and Ming Furniture in the Light of Chinese Architecture.

This first midcareer survey of the work of Yang Fudong (b. 1971) presents films, multichannel videos, and photographs by a leading figure in China's contemporary art world and independent cinema movement.

Yang's work reflects the ideals and anxieties of the generation born during and after the Cultural Revolution that is struggling to find its place in the rapidly changing society of the new China. Although he draws much of his subject matter from the consumerist contexts of contemporary urban China, many of his images recall the literati paintings of seventeenth-century China (Yang first trained in painting before switching to photography and filmmaking). His films and film installations have an atemporal and dreamlike quality, marked by long and suspended sequences, dividing narratives, and multiple relationships and storylines. In his recent installations, Yang reflects on the process of filmmaking itself, creating spatially open-ended multichannel films that he calls a contemporary form of the Chinese hand scroll.

Our presentation of Yang's work includes twenty years of photographs and video and film installations in the galleries; a film series at the PFA Theater co‑curated by the artist that focuses on works that have influenced him, ranging from the Golden Age of Chinese cinema of the 1930s and 1940s to the Fifth Generation filmmakers who rose to prominence in the 1980s; and a continuous loop of Yang's single-channel films daily at midday in the Museum Theater.

Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013 is organized by BAM/PFA Adjunct Senior Curator Philippe Pirotte and presented by BAM/PFA and the Kunsthalle Zürich. The exhibition is made possible in part by an anonymous donor; Marian Goodman Gallery; ShanghART Gallery; Dr. Rosalyn M. Laudati and Dr. James Pick; the Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation; Rena Bransten; Nion McEvoy; and April and Glenn Bucksbaum.

We are delighted to present, for the first time in ten years, a selection of BAM/PFA's earliest Chinese paintings. These rare and amazingly well-preserved works by early landscape and bird-and-flower painters of the late Song and early Yuan periods (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), rendered on silk or paper with ink and light color, demonstrate the sophistication and accomplishment of the early Chinese painting tradition.

Early Chinese painters often depicted the natural world through a lens of gentle mists created by delicate brushwork. Whether capturing a refined corner of the universe, as in Ma Yuan's thirteenth-century Plum Tree and Ducks by a Stream, or a single twisted branch of a grapevine, as in Wen Riguan's thirteenth-century Grapes, it is the artist's control of ink, wash, and line that brings the subject to life. Equally compelling is the anonymous Fish and Water Plants from the fifteenth century, which depicts a powerful carp rising through a bed of delicately rendered vegetation; the very light touches of color in this work add a pleasing naturalism to the scene.

Landscape painters, too, conveyed the beauty and grandeur of the natural world. Their interpretations were not intended to be of specific places rendered in realistic terms, but rather idealized landscapes of retreat and reclusion. The tall trees of Guo Min's Fir and Pines in the Snow (thirteenth century) form a protective circle around a figure pictured in a hut at the base of a fantastic and turbulent mountain. The artist concedes that man is but a small part of a much grander universe. Similarly, River Landscape, attributed to Ma Wan (1325–1365), suggests the glory of the natural world with a remote view that allows the viewer to survey the landscape of mountains, trees, and streams.

This fall at BAM/PFA, you have a wonderful opportunity to see how the rich painting tradition established by these early artists, especially the careful observation of the natural world, continues to inform and inspire with the exhibition Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise.

April 26–27, 2013Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Modern Chinese Humanities
Initiated in 2010, the annual Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Student Conference in Modern Chinese Humanities brings together current graduate students from across the U.S. and around the world to present innovative research on any aspect of modern Chinese cultural production in any humanistic discipline. This not only provides a window into what kind of new research is going on right now in Chinese Studies, but also gives budding scholars the opportunity to interact with peers from geographically disparate institutions whom they might not otherwise be exposed to, allowing a broad platform for the sharing of ideas and interests. Specifically, it is hoped this conference will encourage interdisciplinary scholarship within and between literary and cultural studies, cultural history, art history, film and media studies, musicology and sound studies, as well as the interpretative social sciences.

Applications are due in the fall of each year for the conference taking pace the following spring. Currently-enrolled graduate students at any institution are encouraged to apply. Conference registration is free, and presenters will be provided with lodging by the conference organizers.

Now accepting applications for the 2013 conference!
April 26–27, 2013 at Stanford University